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ToolTips

We all make promises that we can’t keep. I promised I was going to start working on the game rules. And then I realized that there was no GUI element for the cards. You see, in the game, Dominant Species, there are 5 dominance cards drawn each round which the players can take and play during end-of-round scoring. There some 20-odd cards (each unique and exhibiting a surprisingly non-trivial one-time event) in a deck which also serves as the game clock.

They are really important.

So as I was pondering how best to start implementing the “Planning Phase” of the game, I realized that there was a critical UI element that I hadn’t added. Silly me.

So there it is. If you mouse to the top of the screen, the cards slide down from outside the window. If you mouse over a card, it shows a tooltip (that was a pain in the ass to code), and if you mouse away from them, they slide back up out of sight. Easy peasey, nice and cheesy.

Yeah, it was the one done by microprose. There was another one done by Acclaim that was Battlemage or something like that which looked horrible.

DofP was great because it was programmed with the full set of 4th edition m:tg cards, a relatively decent setup for sealed deck tournaments, online play (for free), and an ok (though slightly underwhelming) first player game.

I still play it now and again on ye olde netbook.

I notice that there’s a new DotP on steam, but that looks bad. And probably makes you buy the cards separately.